IF Space Trucker can win today's Smurfit Champion Hurdle and return to a typically raucous Irish welcome around the winners' enclosure, few in the roaring mob are likely to make a big play about him being trained by a woman. That may say something about modern politics and attitudes, but it really says much more about Jessica Harrington.

Traditionally, racing has presented an aggressively male face to the world, yet Harrington, 47, has seamlessly made the transition from struggling non entity to being recognised as one of the very top Irish trainers.

She herself, however, is reluctant to well on the difficulties that plague any trainer starting out in one of the most ruthlessly competitive of sports, never mind the added pressure of having to prove oneself in what is still a largely male dominated industry.

Married to bloodstock agent Johnny Harrington, she contents herself by saying: "When I started training, and people rang up, they would often ask for Johnny. That doesn't happen much anymore."

The training career began nine years ago, but a lifetime spent with horses went before it. A sister of trainer and former top amateur rider John Fowler, Harrington was not encouraged in her point to point riding ambitions - "my father did not think point to points were for girls" - but soon made her mark in the three day event world. She was a member of the Irish team that competed at the Los Angeles Olympics, but rates her third place at the Badminton trials as the most memorable moment of that career.

Since starting training at her stables in Moone, Co Kildare, there have been more memorable moments, most of them ending in first place. Oh So Grumpy's Galway Hurdle preceded Dance Beat's Ladbroke victory, but it was Dance Beat who also gave Harrington her most harrowing day on a racecourse. At Punchestown last November, Harrington saw the mare she had raised since a foal break a leg in the closing stages of her third chase start. She immediately had Dance Beat taken to a horse surgery on the Curragh, but the break was too bad to pin and Dance Beat was put down.

In one of those twists of fate that racing can provide, that was also the day when Space Trucker announced himself as a serious Champion Hurdle contender by winning the Fighting Fifth Hurdle at Newcastle. It was an unlikely announcement. Space Trucker, impressive at home, but something of a recalcitrant hooligan on the track, had had to go to lowly Downpatrick to win his maiden hurdle last summer. However, having done that, he seemed to get the message about what was expected of him.

A campaign through the competitive festival circuit matured Space Trucker, but only Harrington could have believed he would improve so dramatically and even she has had to suspend her belief on occasions.

"When you have to take a horse to Downpatrick to win his maiden, you can't get too ambitious, but he has never stopped surprising us," she says.

The surprises may easily continue. Harrington gave Space Trucker December and January off, knowing that the soft winter ground was unsuitable for him. His return victory at Leopardstown off top weight and on ground with the consistancy of glue surprised even Harrington and since then the gods have shined on Cheltenham so much that Space Trucker is guaranteed his favoured hoof rattling surface.

Even so, his trainer is not getting carried away by ambition. "Maybe he's good enough, maybe he isn't. He doesn't mind how fast they go, he'll settle in and when you pick him up he comes alive, but only the race itself will tell us if he's really good enough," Harrington says.

No one doubts that Space Trucker's trainer will have him primed to show how good he actually is.